Parents Blaming Parents

By Lisa Belkin

Published: October 31, 1999

On a warm Tuesday night in September, 120 people, nearly all African-American, fill the echoing auditorium at the Masonic Temple in Brooklyn. ''No Weapons Allowed, Persons Subject to Scanning'' warns a faded sign at the door, and the words have particular resonance here tonight. The special guests for this evening are Michael and Vonda Shoels, the parents of 18-year-old Isaiah, one of the 12 students slaughtered at Columbine High School six months ago by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Surrounded by their new crop of advisers -- the kind of ubiquitous pod that often sprouts around average people who are thrust into the news -- the Shoelses walk past that sign and onto the stage. Michael, wearing a Western hat and boots with his dark suit, waves heartily to the cheering crowd. Vonda, in a simple pantsuit, stares at the floor. She looks tiny next to her solid husband, and very sad.

The Shoelses, whose son was the only black victim of the attack, have come to this city and to this meeting at the invitation of the Rev. Al Sharpton, who further warms the simmering room with a lusty chant of ''No Justice, No Peace.'' Then it is Michael's turn at the microphone. Before April 20, before Columbine, Michael Shoels was a small-business owner who had never given a full-blown rafters-shaking speech. In his new life as his son's avenger he hungrily seeks the spotlight, and has traveled to Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and now New York. As he speaks, his voice and his emotions rise. Soon he is screaming, his words garbled but his vehemence and his anguish still clear.

''They ask us if we blame the parents?'' he thunders. ''Who else do we blame? I taught my son right from wrong. My son wasn't shooting people up. My son was in the library doing what he was supposed to do.''

That question -- who else do we blame? -- is one that hovers over what is now a roll call of high-school tragedy, lingering long after the blood is washed away and the classes resume. It is a national question, asked by politicians and preachers, and it is a personal one, guaranteed to keep parents awake at night. Are they to blame when their children turn evil? Are parents responsible -- are they liable -- when children kill?

It was a question first asked in Pearl, Miss., after 16-year-old Luke Woodham stabbed his mother to death in October 1997, then shot nine fellow students, two of them fatally. Now the mother of one of the victims is suing Woodham's father.

They're suing in West Paducah, Ky., too, where parents of the three girls shot by 14-year-old Michael Carneal at a morning prayer meeting have brought action against his parents. The discovery process is well under way in Paducah, which means that answers -- or the closest we may ever get to answers -- are beginning to emerge.

In Jonesboro, Ark., where 11-year-old Andrew Golden and 13-year-old Mitchell Johnson staged a false fire alarm and then opened fire on the exiting crowd in 1998, their parents are being sued by the families of those who were killed. There probably would be such a suit in Springfield, Ore., too, where 15-year-old Kip Kinkel killed 4 and wounded 26 if not for the fact that 2 of the victims were the shooter's parents. (All the parents named in these suits have responded with court papers of their own, denying the allegations.)

And then there is Columbine, the massacre that, because it played out on television, seems to have crystallized all the others. Five weeks after the killings, the Shoelses brought a suit against Wayne and Katherine Harris and Thomas and Susan Klebold, asking for $250 million and saying that the parents should have prevented the rampage by their children. With this suit, the push to hold parents responsible for mass murder committed by offspring has taken on the mantle of a movement.

The Shoelses' suit was filed by Geoffrey Fieger, the Michigan attorney and a man who, far more than Michael Shoels, has come to love the public eye. He is best known for representing Dr. Jack Kevorkian, and last May he won a $25 million verdict against the Jenny Jones talk show in a suit that charged that one guest was essentially provoked to murder another. Currently he is defending a 13-year-old Michigan boy accused of committing first-degree murder when he was 11, who is being tried as an adult. He ran a noisy campaign for governor in 1998, and he likes his reputation as a troublemaker. There is a life-size wooden statue of himself in his law office, his blazer riddled with arrows, a shark's fin on his back.

Fieger does not just take on cases; he takes on causes, and he expects this one to create more of a societal earthquake than anything he has touched so far. ''It's an exploration,'' he says, ''of what's going wrong with our kids. In the 200 years of this republic's existence we never had children go into school and slaughter fellow children. What's going on here? Those parents know what happened. And the fact of filing a lawsuit gives me subpoena power to ask the questions we need to ask.''